"I have a question: if an opposite-sex couple is in the middle of having seemingly normal sex, but at some point the man stops affirmatively consenting..."

"... or at least the woman isn't able to 'ensure' he's still affirmatively — what is this law ordering the woman to do, exactly? Push him away? (Notice that the law is written in explicitly gender-neutral terms, with the male and female pronouns, so surely it is supposed to apply to both genders.)"

A question about the new California "affirmative consent" law.

I'm not going to answer that question, posed by my son John, facebooking my "Jerry Brown signs a law" post from yesterday. I'm going to say something more general about legislation.

Those who are actually writing and reading the text of a bill — and I'm sure most legislators don't study the text they vote on — are focused on the problem they think they are solving. Obviously, there are also distortions in the perception of the problem and whether the solution will work, and we should also suspect that legislators are lying about what problem their solution is supposed to fix, but what I want to talk is about how legislators can fail to picture applications of the text to things that are not part of what they think is the problem they think they are solving.

This is especially so when legislators think they are solving a women's problem and simultaneously trying to avoid violating the requisites of equal protection. They produce some strange text, and equal protection will require that text to be applied equally to men and to women.